Seis am Schlern / Siusi allo Sciliar, Italy

Bad Ratzes

A 4-star nature and wellness hotel at 1,212 m at the head of the Ratzes gorge below the Schlern, on the site of an 18th-century mineral bath, roughly 3 km outside the village of Seis am Schlern. It trades as 'Bad Ratzes', VAT IT01191460219, REA BZ-106010, CIN IT021019A1JTQRHUP6, with Petra Mutschlechner Scherer as the named contact and operator; the Impressum carries no company-law suffix, so this is a sole proprietorship or a partnership rather than a capital company. 49 rooms across 17 published categories, from a 24 m² 'Goi-Wiese' double to a 90 m² apartment, sold on 3/4 board. The site is documented from 1191. In 1722 a surgeon from Kastelruth, Anton Schedler, took a licence to exploit two mineral springs in the gorge — one sulphurous, one ferruginous — and built the Ratzer Bäder: a main building, a nine-bed cottage, outbuildings and a chapel. A guest book has been kept continuously since 1855. The two springs still exist and are reachable on foot from the hotel, about 500 m and 700 m away down to the stream bed, but the house describes their therapeutic use in the past tense and sells no treatment based on them. The ownership line is unusually well documented by the hotel itself. Ludwig Prossliner, the last of the family that had held Bad Ratzes for a century, died in 1931 without heirs; the house passed to his granddaughter Erna, daughter of the painter Eduard Burgauner. Erna married Richard Scherlin in 1941 and they had four daughters, who between them came to run four houses in the Schlern valley: Eva and Waltraud at Bad Ratzes, Ilse at Hotel Schwarzer Adler in Seis, and Claudia at the Natur-Residence Dolomitenhof, also in Seis. Eva died in February 2020 and Waltraud retired after 50 years; management passed to their niece Petra, Ilse's daughter, who had worked alongside her aunts since 1993. Petra's four sons are named as the possible next generation. The four houses cross-link each other's websites but are four separate businesses on four separate VAT numbers, with four different web agencies. The commercial proposition is deliberately inclusive rather than à la carte, and that shapes the whole business. 3/4 board covers breakfast, a lunch card, an afternoon spread and a choice-menu dinner; guided hikes five times a week in summer, a bike tour, guided ski touring four times a week in winter, full childcare from six months up and a shuttle to the cable-car station are all in the rate. The new Bad Spa — larch clad, Istrian Kanfanar limestone, a suspended-boulder steam room, indoor and outdoor pools, Finnish and bio saunas, a garden bio-pond with an outdoor sauna and rest cabins built from two decommissioned shipping containers — is a guest facility, not a revenue line: there is no published treatment price list, no day-spa product and no non-resident access. The estate is two hectares of meadow and forest with bee colonies placed along it each spring, not a farm. What the house does sell separately is culture. 'Bad Ratzes Music & Art' runs a vernissage, a two-month exhibition and five concerts through 2026 — jazz, soul, gipsy swing, a Südtirol Jazzfestival date — plus an open-air gourmet dinner on the flower meadow with a wine pairing, explicitly aimed at regional visitors as well as house guests. Booking for all of it is by telephone or email. The house also runs several small monetary mechanics that never touch a booking system: guests who decline room cleaning are handed a €5 credit for the bar, stays are discounted as 7=6, 8=6 and 4=3 free-night offers, and a symbolic contribution is charged on each bottle of spring water. Technically the property runs five systems from four suppliers and joins none of them. The website is SiMedia's proprietary ASP.NET platform (Niederdorf; SiMedia is a brand of Just Impact Group GmbH). The rate list, the last-minute gap display, the newsletter sign-up, the event registration form and the enquiry form are all Anexis widgets. The booking engine is not Anexis but the HGV's Booking Südtirol widget, accommodation ID 10315. The gift-voucher shop is neither: it is Brandnamic's voucher app, which calls Yanovis infrastructure and takes payment through an ACI Open Payment Platform widget. A separate immersive microsite, 'my silence place', sits on a different domain entirely and runs on WordPress. There is no member area, no guest login, no repeat-guest programme and no member rate anywhere in the estate — remarkable for a house whose guest book has been running since 1855. Memberships and labels: Vitalpina Hotels Südtirol, Slowdown Hotels, HGV, GSTC certification via Vireo, and a Travel & Hospitality Award for 2026.

Hotel website ↗